August 12, 2021
I have tried to start making this.
The concept of creating some type of application, whether that be a website, app, etc., first came through my mind around senior year of high school. The idea of the website ‘wethepeople.com’ at first was going to be site where clear, detailed information about politics, elections, Congress would be easily accessible to all. I wanted summaries of legislature that were going through Congress, outlines of candidates’ polices and ideas, as well as a history of all politician’s past action for an increased amount of accountability. This, however, was more work than I was both able and capable of doing, so it was placed in the back of my mind for later reference.
...
August 12, 2021
- Is capitalism steady-state?
- Sending letters to the telegram to the iPhone
- Perfection is impossible to reach unless defined solely by mathematics, but even then measure certainty is still present.
- With this dynamic change, however, the product or system must still be stable and functioning
- Dynamic change must be allowed
- No system or product is perfect at conception
- Perfection can only be rigorously defined through mathematics, and even within math itself, it is impossible to reach. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem tells us that no consistent system is capable of proving all truths and that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. The human language is already full of loosely defined terms that incorporate interpretation, so in an attempt to show that something in perfect mathematics is needed to generate that proof. In order to transfer these physical ideas that are defined within the human language measurements are needed. But with measurements come uncertainties, which then filter into our mathematical landscape that possess holds.
- This un-reachable perfect occurs even in the most simple examples, but humans still live on and with certainty about the painted world around them. Even though perfection cannot be achieved humans can get extremely close to it and for all intents and purposes can safely assume its correctness.
-
http://abyssinia-iffat.com/DoesPerfectionExist.htm
-
http://www.alevelphilosophy.co.uk/handouts_religion/PlatoTheoryForms.pdf
- Another good mathematical, and useful, interpretation of this un-reachable perfect is with the asymptote. Given our function < f(t) = 1 - e^(-t) >, we can see at t = 0, f(0) = 0. But as x increases in value f(t) gets closer and closer to 1. Now in the finite time set, the one which you, I, and all other humans live in, f(t) will never reach 1 a.k.a. perfect. But if we allow our function to run for infinite time, mathematically speaking, f(t) will reach 1.
- So what now? Perfect doesn’t exist; nothing in our lives is certain; why do we even do this? Although perfection cannot be achieved, we still possess its abstraction in our minds
August 12, 2021
General Framework
#
Religion or Philosophy or Nothing?
#
From Physics to Existentialism
#
Why Existentialism
#
Sea of endless purposes, but you can pick one
#
- With your picked purpose, a clear path can be made
- To move around intellectually one must first pick a general framework to work within. Now although this grounding framework cannot be used as a proven fact in an argument, if we are to build ideas from a first-principles standpoint these general frameworks are your starting assumption of how that world works. So what are the options? There are two obvious categories to pick from: religion and philosophy.
- I believe there is no objective purpose in life.
August 12, 2021
On the surface, freedom sounds like an amazing feature to have in your society. Why should I have people telling me how I can live my life? But even with that question, I can already see a flaw. Laws are clearly needed in a society, but they limit my freedom. So maybe freedom is not as strong as we first thought.
The question for building any society to break down the needed and desired features. With this, you will also need to provide the goal of your society, something to guide the implementers in their quest. Without this baseline goal (may sometimes be compared to that of a mission statement in another reading), the reasoning and decisions for you implementation are backed by nothing.
...
August 12, 2021
- Splitting up the group: The total count of Senate members in the United States Congress is 100. These individuals will be split up into 25 total groups of 4: randomly selected, at least one registered Republican and Democrat, meetings are recorded.
- Schedule
- Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (In DC)
- 8:30 am: General Preparation, meeting, emails
- 11:30 am: Lunch
- 11:00 am: Voting
- 1:00 pm: Group Bill Discussion
- 4:00 pm: Break
- 4:30 pm: Free Collaboration Time
- 6:00 pm: END
- Thursday, Friday
- 6:00 am: Travel to represented State
- 8:00 am: Town Hall -> Speeches
- 9:00 am: Town Hall -> Discussion and Votes
- 10:30 am: Repeat Town Hall process
- 1:00 pm: Lunch
- 2:00 pm: Meetings, Discussions, Management
- Document, Voting, and Argument Database (DVAD): [[Make IT]] ??
- There also needs to be a visual overlay for all of the data and their connections. One text document can be accessed, quietly, from multiple computers and devices. In a side tab connected to this document will be the complete voting list for the bill enclosed in the document. Attached to every word, or set of words is a text file full of bullet-pointed arguments, logic, and citation.
- All bills must be filled with relevant graphs, diagrams, or other visual aids to help general summarization of the bill. There must also be an attached worded summary of the bill. This will be used by citizens to view the bill, as well as the Congresspeople.
- Upload PDF allowed
- Upload doc, Docx allowed
- Download new ‘bvd’ file
- Download compose parts of bill PDF, voting and comment excel files
- Accelerate the Voting System
- Why do they say all the names of the Congresspeople and how they vote? Having this information online and in a spreadsheet format would be a much quicker way to relay all of this information. Likewise, the scheduled 15 minute voting periods are slow and archaic. With the development of technology, communication has sped up exponentially. Having to relay your vote to one human being over physical speech is far slower than an online vote with the click of a button. An old 15 minute voting period (that usually goes over time) can now be condensed into a 1 minute or even 10-second time slot. Moreover, if this system is online (hopefully connected to the smartphone of the Congressperson, maybe even within the closed network of the Capital), they could pre-lock their vote anytime before the bill’s voting period.
- Controlling Dynamic Change in your System
- When creating and developing a system with the goal of making it better, one must be able to change that system. If we allow this dynamic change to happen to our system there can be short-term highs and lows of functionality, with long-term growth overall. Without this dynamic change allowed, growth will be slow and sluggish. One problem that arises from allowing dynamic change to happen is the stress that it puts on the functionality of your system. Even though the long-term growth is positive and your system’s functionality will improve, if we look at discrete chunks of time, there is a chance that your system is functioning very poorly. Now, this is not a problem if people or other systems are not relying on the functionality of your system, but if they are, you must do this in mind when attempting to implement improvements.
- With the two goals of overall improvement of your system and high working functionality at all times, you must find the correct level of allowed change to balance these two factors. If we place this framework on the United States government, we can develop some interesting ideas. For one, if we trust that the Founding Fathers were smart men, we could reason why they made our government system so resistant to change. We would hope that they had their citizens in mind and their decisions were made to secure a stable level of governmental functionality.
- Ideas for Research
- What are the optimal group sizes for effective and efficient communication, debate, and decision-making?
- We need our Senator to communicate with high efficiency. They are the elected officials/representatives that are making decisions for the citizens, so we should expect them to be as informed as they can be within the given time frame of a bill. These elected officials are clearly not experts in the majority of the topics that they are supposed to be debating. Of course, there can be some Senators with forms of college degrees that would grant them some expertise in a small area of focus, but the majority of Senators are not. First, it is hard to be an expert in a scientific field that has barely progressed, that is, there has been comparatively little research done in the field of proper ‘governments and societies’ for anyone to be an expert on it. Politics is a hard science where there is little trial and error and seemingly no solid theory except in psychology where the extrapolations are near impossible. So it seems that the ideas and argumentative points given by our Senators need to be commented on by an outside source. This could be the citizens, as it is quite hard for them to be biased against themselves, or a panel of experts, which can be easily biased or stacked to a certain side. This is where a large degree of openness comes in handy. If the Senators’ ideas and argumentative points are clearly labeled and open to the public, we will both have a criticism stream from the citizens and from a now open panel (or decentralized panel cough, cough block-chain of experts share their opinions of the matter). This idea of openness and allowing outsider criticism is nothing new. We have the Senate floor televised for everyone to see. The point and optimization that is occurring here are to decrease the amount of ‘friction’ there is in order to increase the amount in which they occur. You want to make it easier for your citizens to participate in the political endeavor. To decrease friction, the Document, Voting, and Argument Database (DVAD)
- How long should debates/discussions last?
- Of course, in theory, we would want our debates to last infinite time as to discuss all relative facts and argumentative points, but this is not possible nor realistic. If all relevant data is available without a long access time then the time factor mostly plays on how humans intake, process, and reorganize the information. At a baseline, this seems to rely on how fast humans can understand and draw conclusions from a certain amount of data. Assuming that most of these processes will take more than a day, how long can humans intake and think about a certain set of data points before slowing down? How should breaks be incorporated into the day to keep the minds of the Senators shark? Assuming that there are multiple bills on the floor, we should only one block of discussion per bill per day (this block could enclose multiple breaks), unless the bill has a very high priority.
- Below needs to be organized
- The Scheduling Process for Bills
- Let us first have a look at some scheduling algorithms and some terms that define them.
- Scheduling Algorithm: strategy used to pick a ready task for execution to the processor.
- the strategy used to decide which bills will be debated on what date, for how long, and when they should be voted on by the Senate.
- Process terms:
- r : ready time of adding to the queue
- s : start time of execution
- f : finish time of execution
- d : absolute deadline
- Preemptive: the running task can be temporarily suspended to execute another task. If debate has started for a bill, the Senate can shift the focus to another bill.
- Non-preemptive: the running task cannot be suspended until completion or until it is blocked. If debate has started for a bill, it must be debated until a final vote has been reached.
- Static or Dynamic: are decisions based on parameters that change with time? Fixed priority vs. dynamic priority?
- Heuristic or Optimal: can you prove that the algorithm is optimal in terms of certain criteria or not?
- Online or Offline: are the decisions made prior to knowledge of task activations (offline), or are they taken at run time based on the set of active tasks (online)?
- Average Response Time: a metric to optimize/minimize
- Response Time: R = f - r
- Average Response Time: average of all the response times of all the processes in a queue.
- Once a bill has been sponsored and proposed, the Senate would want to minimize the debate time to get the bill voted on more quickly.
- First Come, First Served (FCFS): non-preemptive, Online, Heuristic
- FCFS is rather unpredictable: response times depend strongly on task arrival times.
- Not suitable for real-time systems.
- Shortest Job First (SJF): pick the task with the shortest computation time
- Optimal: minimized average response time
- Non-preemptive
- Not optimal for real-time in the sense of feasibility
- Priority Scheduling: each task is assigned a priority, the highest priority goes first
- Preemptive
- Can be static or dynamic
- Online
- Starvation: low priority tasks may experience very long delays due to preemptive by high priority tasks.
- To handle starvation, we can implement aging: priority increases with waiting time.
- Round Robin (RR): the ready queue is FCFS, then each task has a Q unit of time (quantum) to execute after Q time is placed in the back of the queue.
- All processes run all the time (no starvation)
- Shortest jobs complete first
- “Fairly” split resources
- Delta: the amount of time needed to switch between tasks, context switch time
- But how does any of this relate to the Senate and Congress as a whole? The idea is to increase efficiency within our bill-making process. We want better and more thorough bills faster. In most cases, the Round Robin Scheduling approach is used as it creates an appearance of a smooth working system as all tasks appear to run at the same time. In the context of the Senate, this seems to be a valid approach as most bills (besides the annual budget) are worth equal footing to the whole of the US. As the tasks that are queued into a processor usually only deal with and concern themselves, all bills that are processed in Congress should be under the single-subject rule. This not only allows Congress to deal in one relative logical realm at a time but also gets rid of the nonsensical tool of a “rider” or “wrecking amendment”.
August 12, 2021
To think that Capitalism is the steady-state or even the best economic system that humans can think of is a slap in the face of the engineering mindset. But even with that, it is true to say that it is the strongest and most powerful system that is in place today (2021). We can add higher-order Socialist terms to help correct some of the downfalls of Capitalism, but switching to Socialism, as our economic system would not be beneficial.
...
August 12, 2021
When humans were first starting to socialize and group together, peer to peer connectivity was high but low in numbers. Tribal communities of max 150-200 people had high peer-to-peer connectivity. People in the tribe knew each other very closely and personally. They had to. Without a large fictional group to be organized by, people had to actually learn and trust each other.
But as technology increases, the level of peer-to-peer connectivity decreases. Likewise, the number of connections does increase as technology increases. Technology, in this sense, is anything that can get better over time. The human brain is a piece of technology that can improve over time. Societies and governments are a piece of technology that can improve over time. Electronic devices are a piece of technology that can improve over time.
...
August 12, 2021
Imagine you’re designing a scheduling scheme for the CPU in your computer. Or in another abstraction, you’re attempting to run multiple programs on your computer. (The computer architecture analogy works well when dealing with systems that need to be optimized because CPU schedulers and computers in general have been optimized both on a heuristic and mathematical level. They are great examples of engineers and theorists doing amazing work.) In both of these scenarios, we have an entity that needs to manage multiple tasks. Some tasks may be of high priority, but for now each tasks needs to get done and progress relatively evenly. Now lets say one task holds on to this processing entity indefinitely because it does not want the others tasks to progress. Your computer is now frozen. Lets now explore the possibilities of why this task would freeze your computer. One possible reason of why your computer is now frozen is because the other tasks are actually malware and were going to damage your computer. We would then thank the task that froze your computer as it was protecting you. A different possibility is that this freezing task is actually the malware, and wanted to freeze your computer to halt your work. In either scenario, a corrupt task was let into your queue. This is more of a problem involving the input security of your computer and not the process scheduler. Now how does this translate to the United State’s Congress?
...
August 10, 2021
If a word does not have a defined functionality or purpose attached/associated with it, that word has not been optimized.
A sharper-than-normal rock might be used as a cutting tool, no one has sharpened this rock with purpose. It is just an object found in nature. It’s sharpness only arises from the action of erosion or gravity dropping it. Likewise, this rock has not been created by a human, an organism with the ability to think abstractly about things and to create with purpose. This rock, then, is probably not as sharp as your average kitchen knife, something that have been created with a purpose.
...
August 10, 2021
Perspective (noun): the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance
The human body interfaces with the outside through our five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. This information from the outside world then filters through the body into the brain where it is processed. With regards to how someone sees the world, their perspective, variation can come in three different ways.
The first, and less complex one, is variation in our actual mechanics of gathering information from the outside world; these are the five senses stated before. People have different abilities to see, different levels of sensitivity in all of the senses. This variation, however, doesn’t cause a large perspective change from person to person. Someone with better eye-sight won’t have greater insights into the world. The raw information coming into a human many vary, but these variations are small compared to the amount of data that is actually coming in.
...